News and Thanet issues. Ramsgate Margate and Broadstairs are the three main towns on The Isle of Thanet situated in the far southeast of England.
I run the bookshop in Ramsgate see www.michaelsbookshop.com I publish over 100 books about the history of this area click here to look at them.

Sunday, 10 June 2012

Ramsgate, poker, motorbikes, is The Stig a woman, Hells Angels and photography, a Sunday Ramble

The pictures decorating this post are of the
poker run, basically what happens is that this is a charity motorcycle event
where motorcyclists pay a fee to take part that goes to charity.

At each destination they are given a poker card
and the one who wins the poker hand at the end wins the event

Breakfast conversation this morning was along
the lines of as the Williams test driver Suzi Wolff is of the female persuasion
could The Stig in fact be a woman.

I am a bit wary of posting motorcycle pictures after last
week, I went to the Margate Meltdown took abut about a thousand pictures of the
event, put them on the internet and then got rather a bizarre communication
from one of the Hells Angels there asking me to remove the pictures containing
Hells Angels.

Whereas I am fairly happy to publish pictures that KCC,
local developers and so on don’t want published, aging secondhand booksellers
aren’t really in a position to take on a chapter of Hells Angels so I took the
lot down.

At some time in the future I may go through all of the
pictures and try and work out which ones contain who and try to republish some
of them, frankly with about a thousand pictures containing several thousand
motorcyclists mostly wearing leathers this wouldn’t be an easy task.

I guess much of the problem here relates to people assuming
that I must have some ulterior and probably commercial motive for publishing
pictures of local events, the truth of the matter is that I do it because I
can.

If you go to any event there will be loads of people there
with cameras taking thousands of pictures but round here, apart form the odd
handful of shots it is only the ones I have taken that seem to appear in any
quantity on the internet.

Anyway if you find a photo that you want removed
for one reason or another the way to approach this is to email me, address on
the sidebar, the web address of the page it appears on, how many pictures down
the page it is and a rough description of the picture. If the request is
reasonable I will remove it.

I will endeavour to ramble on here............. Rambling on now.

Have you noticed how you don’t seem to get as
much lead in your pencil these days? Brushes seem much as they were, but
pencils seem to be thinner on the inside.

I have been working on sketching while standing up today,
you wouldn’t think this would be particularly difficult, but I find it so.

We have been shopping at Westwood Cross, this started well
as I spent some time in Hobbycraft unscrewing the tops of watercolour tubes to
see what colour the paint was and eventually bought a very large sheet of
paper.

But sooner or later the question of what I could actually
do in clothes shops raised its head and as you can see from the picture above,
the answer has resolved into learning to sketch standing up.

Anyway as I don’t think I can watercolour paint standing up
unless I make some specialist paint box that clips to my sketchpad in some way
and contains water I have been looking at the dry media.

I think chalk is out of the question, so it is some
form of crayon, pencil or pen.

We went to Walmer Castle last Thursday and working through
my sketchpad I thought I would try a watercolour from one of the sketches I drew
when we were there.

I don’t really like painting from photographs and can’t
really explain why, there is plenty one can say but that’s how it is.

Photographing paintings is not that easy either the
photo above is with flash and the one below without, same painting which doesn’t
really look like either of the photos.

I am in the very early stages of using better
and drastically more expensive paper.

Here is the sketch I used for the painting,
drawn looking at the castle mostly through trees, so you couldn’t really tell
what shape it is at all.

I used my big paintbox which has loads of
colours that I don’t understand, Vandyke Brown, Cadmium Yellow and Brown
Madder were the extra ones i used in this picture, I use Brown Madder Alizarin quite a bit and didn’t realise that they haven’t
made that colour for about thirty years, the replacement tube wasn’t what I expected.

2 comments:

I see the port is hosting a European conference on 22nd June a good day for the anti animal export banners to come out, the bigwigs from calais and other major ports will be there and the Chief executive of the Britsih ports association apparently.

Please note comments that may be libellous, comments that may be construed as offensive, anonymous derogatory comments about real people, comments baiting internet trolls, comments saying that an anonymous comment was made by a named real person, boring comments and spam comments, comments in CAPs will be deleted. Playground stuff like calling real people by their time stamp or surname alone, referring to groups as gangs, old duffers and so on will result in deletion. Comment that may be construed as offensive to minority groups is not allowed here either, so think before you write it, remember that the internet is a public place, that it is very difficult to be truly anonymous and that everyone who uses it leaves a trail of some sort. Also note the facility to leave anonymous comment will be turned of during periods when I am unable to monitor comment, this will not affect people commenting who are signed on to their blogger accounts. When things are particularly difficult on the commercial spam front I may turn comment moderation on for periods.

If you feel that someone has left a comment that is offensive and directed at you personally please email me (link on the sidebar) asking to have it removed, you will need to tell which post and the date and timestamp of the offending comment. Please do not reply to the offending comment as I will assume you continuing the dialogue as meaning that you want the comments left there.

Saturday for me was pure self indulgence, so first I went to Canterbury Cathedral, I have to admit that I find advent one of the hardest ...

recent comments

Local history facilities.

Much of the local history I publish is available for free on this blog, in some cases I have linked whole books to blog postings, if you want a printed copy of one of the books I publish click here postage is free to UK addresses.

Alternatively you can of course come to my bookshop in Ramsgate and browse them and about 30,000 secondhand books on other subjects, remember we close Thursdays and Sundays.